Liz Moore - The Unseen World

“Oh,” said Ada, embarrassed.

“ She sued him ,” whispered Mrs. O’Keeffe. “For defamation of character. In the papers and everything. This wasn’t a lady you’d want to have over for dinner. Poor Mrs. Sibelius took to her bed,” she added.

“Do you know when that happened?” asked Ada.

“Let’s see, now,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe, putting a trembling hand to her cheek. “Directly before I was married and left: 1923. Spring of 1923, most likely. Of course, this gave the maids on the block plenty to talk about,” she said.

When she had finished speaking, she drifted into quietness again, and at last Ada thanked her, and told her good night.

“Now don’t tell your father I told you this,” said Mrs. O’Keeffe. “If he’d wanted you to know, he’d have told you himself, wouldn’t he?”

The next day, at the library, Ada told Miss Holmes what she had learned, and their focus shifted. Instead of looking at the society pages, she and Gregory spent the afternoon scanning the Times for articles from the spring of 1923.

Occasionally Miss Holmes stopped by to check on their progress. There were two microfilm readers at the Fields Corner branch and they had been monopolizing them for days. Fortunately, there was not much in the way of competition.

At 4:45, fifteen minutes before the library was due to close, Gregory held up his left hand. Ada saw him in her peripheral vision.

“What is it?” she asked.

“Come look,” said Gregory. His face was pink with pleasure: he had found something.

There, on the screen in front of him, was a headline: “Miss Polly Howard Files Suit against Sibelius Heir.” And on the next page, a clear black-and-white image of a man emerging from a courtroom, flashes going off as reporters swarmed him. His face was turned directly toward the camera, and he was looking at it with palpable contempt, the edges of his mouth turned down, his chin tilted upward.

Ada considered it. From her backpack, she produced the photograph of David and his parents from the studio in Olathe.

There was no question: the man in the newspaper looked nothing like David. He was the twin, instead, of the boy in the photograph Ellen Palmer had produced. J. Fairfax Sibelius, in the newspaper, was short, bulldoggish, heavy-jowled, and fair; the man in the Olathe photograph was tall and thin and dark, like David.

Lying in her bed that night, Ada could not sleep. She was trying not to despair; but it seemed that the more they researched David, the less of his life felt understandable and true. It seemed as if her questions were growing in number while her answers shrank. It had already been three weeks since Miss Holmes had called the librarian in Olathe, and one since she had left a second message, but they had received no information about Harold Canady. Perhaps, she thought, it was simply a nonsense name: several syllables David had babbled in a row. The disease made him seem to speak sometimes in tongues.

The most important piece of unsolved evidence she had now seemed to her to be the disk that David had given her, and as she looked into the dark of her room, she decided that it was, perhaps, time to call in the experts. There was nothing more to lose.

Frank Halbert was, David always liked to say, more of a worker than a thinker. “Every lab needs one of them, though,” he said. It was not surprising, therefore, that on Saturday, Frank was the first to arrive at the Steiner Lab, a puzzled look on his face.

Ada was waiting outside. She no longer had a key, and she did not know the new guard who had started working since she’d last been to the lab.

“Hi,” said Ada. It had been six months since the last time she’d seen Frank, when he came over to Liston’s for dinner. It had not been so very long before that that she had spent every day working side by side with him — with everyone at the lab. But now she felt shy around him. She had heard from Liston that he’d gotten engaged recently, and she wanted to tell him congratulations, but she lacked the courage and the poise.

“Hi, Ada!” said Frank, brightly. He stood back, regarding her for a moment. “It was a nice surprise to hear from you,” he said. “Do you want to go up? The others should be here soon.”

Ada had also invited Hayato and Charles-Robert. She had specifically not invited Liston. On the phone, the night before, with each of the other members of the lab, she had asked them not to tell her. She had told them all that she would explain tomorrow.

So, that morning, when Liston had announced that she would be going to a mall in the suburbs with Matty and a friend, Ada was relieved: she would not have to make up an excuse regarding her whereabouts. And when Liston asked her, hopefully, if she wanted to come, Ada had declined, citing homework.

“Okay, honey,” said Liston. “Tell me if you need anything, all right?”

As she left, Ada felt a slight pang of guilt, or confusion, about Liston. At times, she forgot that she was still mad at her; in the kitchen, Liston would tease her and she would laugh easily. Or in the morning, Liston would leave an encouraging note on the counter, lumping Ada in warmly with the rest of her brood, telling them all to have a nice day, and Ada would read it gratefully, happy to be included, happy to be part of a large loud family. And then, inevitably, she would catch herself. She would call herself a traitor; and she would remember Liston’s traitorousness, how quickly she had accepted the idea that David had been lying, how dismissive she had been of any argument to the contrary. Misguided , Liston often said, when describing David’s actions. But that was just as bad as calling him deceitful. Worse, perhaps; for it implied some plasticity in his character, some weakness. Yes: she was glad that Liston was not there with them at the lab that morning. The existence of the floppy disk was a secret she had been keeping to herself; if it yielded nothing helpful, she did not want Liston to know.

The lab had changed very little since David’s retirement. Liston, preferring her office over anyone else’s, hadn’t moved. Instead, they had simply turned David’s office into a smaller seminar room for meetings with the group. There was a table in the center now, but everything else was the same: there, in the corner, was David’s desk, a new Mac resting on it now.

It was in this room that they all gathered, which felt to Ada something like time travel. The smell of it: warm electronics and wood. Even the crack in the ceiling was familiar to her.

She sat facing the three of them: Frank, Hayato, and Charles-Robert, who was regarding her with something like bemusement.

“So,” he said to her, “you look different than the last time we saw you, madam.”

“Thanks,” said Ada, not knowing what else to say. She was embarrassed. She had been wearing her hair differently, at the encouragement of Theresa. She had forgotten to wear her glasses; she had still been doing without them whenever she could, and that day she walked out of the house without them.

“How have you been, Ada? How’s David?” asked Hayato, kindly.

“Okay,” said Ada. Against her will she felt a tremble in her chin. And she realized that she felt betrayed by not just Liston, but all of them, all of them. Her friends. Something like her family. Where had they been?

The three of them glanced at each other. They were sitting across the table from her, three in a row, so that she felt as if they were interviewing her.

“I’m sorry we haven’t been in touch,” said Frank. “We just — weren’t sure how to react, in light of. .”

“It’s okay,” Ada said again. She did not want to hear what they had to say. She had not yet taken her jacket off, her blue ski parka, and it was making her warm. It bunched up around her shoulders as she sat against the hard back of the chair. In her pocket, she touched the four corners of the floppy disk she had brought with her. It was one of the copies she had made. The original disk that David had given her was still at Liston’s, in its dictionary, for safekeeping.